As Land Board members, our job is simple: defend Montana ranchers, the school trust, and our way of life. We don’t cater to out-of-state billionaires looking to turn our backyard into their playground.
For years, American Prairie has been attempting to push out our ranching communities, threatening our livestock industry and our way of life in Montana. Recently, thanks to the Trump Administration, the Bureau of Land Management proposed to scrap American Prairie’s federal bison grazing permits wrongfully granted under the Biden administration, which would have been detrimental to the livestock and ranching industries in Northeastern Montana.
Now, American Prairie has turned its eye to public state trust lands. If American Prairie has its way, bison may be able to take grass from your cows, hammer your fences, increase predator pressure, and disease risk for neighboring operations. Our state’s rules on state trust lands were written for production livestock – cows, sheep, and horses – not for a large-scale conservation bison scheme being pushed by American Prairie. In fact, the law does not even clearly define how a bison counts as an animal unit on a state grazing lease. That is not a minor technicality; it is a serious management problem.
When you dramatically change forage use and wildlife patterns across large landscapes, you put water, riparian areas, and weed control on the line. Streams, springs, and wetlands can be overused. Invasive species can spread. Fencing and infrastructure designed for cattle can be overwhelmed by heavier, more mobile animals. And when something breaks, it is not the out‑of‑country donors who show up with a post pounder and a weed sprayer. It is the neighbors – the same ranch families who are already shouldering rising input costs, volatile markets, and regulatory pressure.
Now, we’re doing our part on the Land Board to protect our state trust lands from these out-of-touch liberal elites. Before we allow any more bison onto state trust land, we’re going to fix the rules, which is why we made two motions at last month’s Land Board meeting to protect the integrity of lands that generate income for our public schools as clearly defined in the Montana Constitution.
First, until we have clear, enforceable stocking‑rate rules that explicitly address bison – how they count, how they move, and how their impacts are managed – there will be no new bison leases on state trust lands. This will protect the trust from poorly defined arrangements and protect neighboring ranchers from being the unwitting shock absorbers for someone else’s experiment.
Second, we reaffirmed that state grazing leases should favor production livestock operations. That means we continue to prioritize Montana families who put beef on the table and real revenue into our school trust – not non‑production hobby herds or ideological projects dressed up as “conservation.” At a time when the national cattle herd is shrinking and food security is a real issue; it would be reckless for the state to kick the legs out from under our own livestock industry in favor of a billionaire‑funded science project.
Our message is simple: if you want to run an experiment with a wild buffalo herd, you will not do it on the backs of Montana ranchers or at the expense of our school trust. If American Prairie and its donors want to gamble, they can do it on their private land, under clear rules and full accountability.
We will continue to defend our trust lands as working lands and the Montana ranchers who are the backbone of our rural economies. Montana’s future will be written by the people who live here, raise families here, and make a living off this land – not by distant elites trying to remake our landscape to suit their ideology.
Austin Knudsen is the Republican attorney general for Montana and James Brown is the Republican state auditor for Montana.